Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

The non-Indian devotees had the least patience with my questions, but one of the Indian ashramites explained some of the subtleties of Sai Baba's thought. "Swami teaches that there are four types of people. Artha type. Poor in all senses, scarred on the inside. Arthathee type. They want things. They seek to have things. Jidnyasu type. They only have questions. They need answers. And the Jnani

type, who are enlightened. They know everything. They see a cloud and they know it will rain."

I said, "I think I'm a Jidnyasu. Just questions."

"Yes. I can see." I was taking notes—these were hard words to spell.

"Swami says, 'I'm not here to preach new thoughts.'"

That was a good approach.

"Don't search for God out there—search within yourself. Attain happiness. Search for ananda"—bliss or serenity.

I said, "I've been trying."

"'What is God?' Swami asks. And he answers, 'It is experience.'"

"I like that."

"Believe in yourself."

With that, the devotee left me to find my own path. I sat near the twice-life-size statue of the tuneful goddess Saraswati, who was depicted playing her sitar. I remembered someone had told me that Sai Baba could work miracles, but lovable ones, such as producing chocolates in his hand for children.

"Yes, he does miracles," another devotee said. "But only to attract illiterates. Chamatkara, they are called. They are meant to astonish you."

There were hundreds, perhaps thousands of accounts of Sai Baba's miracles, claiming they were proof of his divinity. These included mak ing objects such as crucifixes and Bibles appear, multiple healings, miraculous messages, instances of translocation—the transfer of humans, some of them dead—and a celebrated manifestation of the Koh-i-Noor diamond when Sai Baba criticized an audience for being dazzled by the gem: "Did any one of you even glance at me who created it, as you clamored for a look at that piece of creation?" Many former adherents had come forward to denounce Sai Baba for faking his miracles.

But the basic philosophy emphasizes the inner light that people can find in their own hearts, and the power of practical work. Hands that help are better than lips that pray

—one of the Swami's sayings would not have sounded strange if spoken by Lenin, Mao, Jesus, or Jimmy Carter.

"People come here from all over," the guard at the front gate said. "Some imams from Iraq. And Ravi Shankar. Hillary Clinton wanted to come, but security was a problem, so she didn't come."

Near this quiet compound of spiritual renewal—down the noisy congested road—was more of booming Bangalore. I walked outside the gate and took a taxi to International Tech Park. Its new buildings loomed in the distance, rising from watermelon stands, clusters of rickshaws, fix-it shops, juice stands, and food stalls.

Behind the walls of Tech Park, among the towering glass-and-steel buildings with glittering signs—Infosys, Oracle, Disa, Think Inc., and others—was one for Perot Systems. I recalled the diminutive, quack-voiced, jug-eared Texan, Ross Perot, running for president of the United States on a platform called United We Stand America, which included the pledge to prevent jobs from being outsourced to places like India. Perot spoke of how we would hear "a giant sucking sound" as American jobs were lost. Now, having failed in his bid for the presidency, the quacking tycoon had found that Indians in Bangalore would work for a fraction of what an American would earn.

Many of the jobs being done in the Bangalore call centers had once been performed in the United States by college students and housewives. All were part-timers. The work was tedious and poorly paid.

But around 2001, American companies—and there were now thousands of them in this city alone—discovered that young Indian graduates with good degrees, fluent in English, well-mannered, patient, and persistent, would do the same jobs, full time, for very little money. The city had become so widely recognized as a business alternative that in an April 2006 episode of The Simpsons, the town of Springfield outsourced the operation of its nuclear plant, and Homer Simpson went to Bangalore to find Indian employees for the plant. Bangalore was perhaps the best-known center of cheap, trainable labor in the world. I wondered why, until I went there and found that at the time I visited the call centers, the entry-level employees (most of them university graduates) were earning less than $2,500 a year. Bangalore's prosperity rests on these people—their need for work, their high educational attainments, their skills, their good character, their prudent austerity, their punctuality, their humble status, and most of all their willingness to work for low pay.